Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-13/Wikimania

Wikimania

Promised the moon, settled for the stars

Prologue: hackathon

As has become traditional, Wikimania proper was preceded by a two-and-a-half day hackathon, with entry at slight additional cost. While there had been concerns from hackathon organisers about what percentage of those registered would actually attend, it was clear from the word "go" that it would be alright on the night: the introductory session on Wednesday morning was packed, and numbers remained high throughout Thursday and into Friday. For attendees it was an opportunity to get in some 'hacking'—any coding of an interesting nature, including work on tools, gadgets, MediaWiki and its extensions—meet other developers, and enjoy the comfortable (if slightly unusual) surroundings of the Barbican's tropical conservatory and garden room. On a warm summer's day, it felt like a greenhouse—not least because, in a very real sense, it was.

Nevertheless, the social atmosphere was Wikimania at its best: light, enthusiastic and welcoming to those more unfamiliar with the movement and its goals, here including an impressive assortment of journalists. Staff proved approachable, mixing freely with volunteers—indeed, the sessions served as a reminder that Wikimedians are peculiarly lucky in that regard. Such positivity even crept into sessions as potentially fraught as that led by the Foundation's Fabrice Florin, a presentation and chat about the development direction of the controversial Media Viewer extension. Although there were minor quibbles, like the sprawling Barbican making it difficult to move from registration (floor: -1) to venue (floor: 4), or the deployment of sandwiches at lunch ("originally supposed to be lasagne", Ed noted critically) and nothing at dinner, it was an uncomplicated unconference executed well. Even the WiFi held up, as it did throughout the conference—more or less.

Opening session and keynotes

The opening session of Wikimania, held alongside a welcome drinks reception on the Thursday evening, could roughly be divided into two halves. The first consisted of four speakers (Ed Saperia, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive Jon Davies, Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov) enlisted to give short welcome speeches. Apart from an off-the-cuff remark from Wales that he wished the press would talk "less about the monkey" and more about the substantive issues raised in his pre-Wikimania press conference, the burden of getting the packed auditorium to tear themselves away from their phones/tablets/buzzword bingo cards fell to Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International and sole keynote speaker of the Thursday evening session. Though many of Shetty's remarks fell on sympathetic ears, it was his allusions to certain problems of scaling—the forced creation of staff headquarters in developing nations; the difficulties of running a global institution alongside local chapters—which stood out and it was a shame that Shetty did not share more of his considerable experience during the keynote itself.

Shetty was arguably the most prominent of the non-Wikimedia names on the list of featured speakers—surprising, perhaps, for a conference that had won the bidding process promising speakers including Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and even Stephen Fry (see related Signpost coverage). Nevertheless, the speakers eventually organised proved sufficient to regularly fill and continuously entertain the cavernous Barbican Hall. The final lineup thus included Danny O'Brien (along with Wales, one of the two survivors of the original London bid), Jack Andraka, and, able to draw on the UK's well developed civil society infrastructure, representatives of the thinktank Demos, Code Club and Young Rewired State among others: an admirable and effective lineup, if not quite the "VIP speakers (academics, politicians, media, entertainment)" originally described by Jimmy Wales in July 2012. In a Wikimania first, all of the featured speakers' presentations were reliably streamed live and recordings rapidly made available online, a real boon considering Wikimedia's global appeal and the months-long delays from previous Wikimanias.

Other tracks

In total, Wikimania 2014 claimed some 200 sessions over 8 simultaneous tracks, replete with the inevitable scheduling and organisational headaches. The organisers will be pleased with the variety they achieved: notable themes including open access, open data, technology, GLAM and diversity were all well-represented, while smaller topics (the legal aspects of Wikipedia, for example) seemed neatly stitched into accessible 90 minute blocks. The Barbican's cavernous layout and the comfort of its designed-for-purpose auditoria thus conspired to make these blocks, rather than individual sessions, the primary unit of time management—to the benefit of some of the more niche interest talks on the programme. Each talk seemed ably staffed by the conference's apparently vast team of volunteers, both technically and in terms of sticking to their timetables. The blocks were then in turn punctuated by coffee breaks, lunch, and on some days (but confusingly not all) dinner. Although hackathon attendees quickly got used to the "packed lunch" format, it was the dinners that particularly stood out, including bitesize burgers, skewers and sea-bream tacos (to name a few), served in reasonable quantity but alas with the purity of queuing to which many native Britons (the author included) are accustomed.

Aided by the high overall attendance (an estimated 2000, making London the largest Wikimania to date) all the sessions seemed to receive good levels of participation; there were not enough chairs, for example, to incorporate everyone attending an event on copyright, not usually a floor filler. Saperia added that hundreds of those tickets had been sold in the final days before the start of Wikimania proper—a reminder that it was not just hardcore Wikimedians in attendance. For those unable to attend a talk that they would have liked to—and with eights tracks, that included many attendees—slides and numerous recordings are now available. The quality of the talks varied, but around a high mean; early evidence suggests numerous standout sessions (the author would recommend Brandon Harris' unique performance style, though his two talks were of very different kinds). Unsurprisingly many attendees also turned to Twitter to add their comments to those of a hyperactive Wikimania social media team, with an estimated 21,000 tweets using the #wikimania or #wikimania2014 hashtags over the course of the three day conference.

Closing speeches

After a brief video in support of the students of Sinenjongo High School in their WMF-supported campaign to get Wikipedia Zero more widely adopted in the Global South, Jimmy Wales once more took to the stage to give his "state of the wiki" remark. Most pertinent of these was his comment that too often what is intended as a minimum bar serves to define the normal and thus to hive off as supererogatory many of the virtues for which Wikimedia ought to strive: not just mere civility, Wales suggested, but "kindness, generosity, forgiveness, compassion", a "morally ambitious" programme he said, but an achievable one. He also noted YouGov research that indicated the British public trusts Wikipedia more than both the tabloid and quality press.

Wales' annual Wikimedian of the Year award went this year to Ihor Kostenko, a prominent Ukrainian Wikipedian and journalist tragically killed in the civil unrest that engulfed the capital Kiev earlier this year (see Signpost special report: "Diary of a protester—Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest"). It was a poignant and appropriate choice, although in a hat-tip to potential future controversy over the awarding of the honour, Wales promised to ensure a more "democratic" process was in place ahead of Wikimania 2015. After presenting some of the hosting chapter (Wikimedia UK)'s annual awards of their behalf, attention turned more fully to next year's event, with a brief introductory video shown by the Mexico City team. Of its slogans, "our venue: Vasconcelos library" and "gay friendly" received the most enthusiastic support among the thousand-strong audience.

The speeches (including brief remarks by WMF Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede) were followed by the Wikimania closing party, an event backed by reasonable but not excessive amounts of free alcohol, and a selection of musical accompaniments in a variety of styles. Indeed, such entertainment was provided on each evening of the conference, interspersed with comedy performances on a technology theme. The latter especially was a brave choice, and the organisers will be forgiven if the jokes fell a little flat, or the dancefloor was a little empty. Patrons were also able to take advantage of the hackathon rooms—left open well into the night—or escape outside where attractive fountains punctuated the cold brutalist structure of the Barbican estate. The more adventurous tried the City of London's wallet-busting public houses, if only for novelty value.

Epilogue: looking back

Discuss this story

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Would have liked to have read the author's thoughts about the keynote speech by Lila Tretikov, which struck me as being particularly useful for anyone trying to divine her thoughts on where the WMF projects are now, where they're going, and some of the steps she feels are needed to get there. Risker (talk) 02:25, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Risker, I had the same thoughts, and . Ziko (talk) 20:13, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

These are unfolding on Lila's talk page. Very positive discussions, I think, but a certain "hold the line" rather than "do the right thing" flavour is still evident. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:23, 20 August 2014 (UTC).

Re: "kindness, generosity, forgiveness, compassion", - that effort would convince me more had it not been accompanied by the phrase "incredibly toxic personalities" which I believe expresses a way of thinking about other people or a group of people that contradicts the goal. I learned that the phrase was already used in 2009, see my talk. Room for improvement. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:02, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Gerda, you need to readjust your priorities: we are no longer interested in creating an encyclopaedia, full of ("allegedly") high-quality content. Instead we are now more interested in a nice fluffy environment when we spend so much time stroking each others egos or drawing up a Black Book of people who don't think fluffy thoughts, that nothing ever actually gets written. I felt decidedly uncomfortable watching the video stream: despite intentions, or the claims to the contrary, it does create a climate of fear, a toxic environment for people to work in. Incivility I can ignore or laugh at: a reign of fear whereby good editors are "encouraged to leave" is a depressing and worrying development. - SchroCat (talk) 16:41, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Without considering that he himself might be one of the "toxic personalities". Let me think about that for a minute. Tony (talk) 08:31, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think nobody should be in such a category, not even one who can think of it. Move in harmony, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:56, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My family and I have been there in Wikimania and it was great for us. We shared experiences and impressions with people from many places. Kindness was one of the main themes of the meeting. We've been reminded to be kind even to people that are aggresive to us. Once I was even explained to be kind to politicians! Next time we can, we'll repeat. B25es (talk) 12:00, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
This year's Wikimania was indeed quite good, although the keynote speech by Shetty was completely out of place. It had clear political undertones and was insulting to many attendees I spoke to. Even if someone had to invite a political figure to the conference, they should've talked more about how that organization is relevant to the open knowledge movement, or as the author noted how they deal with organizational problems. Instead, one can sum up the long talk with "All governments are evil, but especially the ones in countries fighting terrorism". Not exactly something you'd want at a Wiki conference. —Ynhockey ^(Talk) 13:48, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The show of hands in the auditorium suggests well over half the attendees on Thursday were supporters of Amnesty or at least sympathetic to its aims. QuiteUnusual (talk) 19:12, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's not the point. The movement makes a point about being an apolitical organization, so having a blatantly political talk at our annual conference is something that should never be done. It is even more significant when this is your keynote, likely to be heard by all of the conference attendees and covered by the media. —Ynhockey ^(Talk) 09:59, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What was "blatantly political" about it? Seems to me that Shetty's viewpoint was that most governments (or their agents) are capable of doing bad things, including but not limited to detention without trial, torture and other abuses of political prisoners, extraordinary rendition, "disappearances", capital punishment, attacks on civilians and so on. (Did he mention privacy intrusions? Can't remember.) And that such bad things are... bad. Whereas free information is good - and can help mitigate these problems. Sure, lots of governments justify some of these bad things by mentioning terrorism (China, Russia, USA, UK, Iran, Israel, Syria, both past and present Ukrainian governments, and doubtless others) but that doesn't somehow mean Shetty's talk was an argument in favour of a softer line on terrorism. I think he did a great job of explaining how Amnesty's struggles mirror the struggles of the Wikipedia movement in many important ways. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:29, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bad things are bad. And it was a good talk. But Ynhockey has a valid point, it was effectively Amnesty recruiting spiel, it associates WP with AI - sure the organizations have a lot in common, much of it is shared with many, even most organizations - they started form humble beginnings, no-one thought they would succeed, etc...

It could have been a talk on the importance of free and open information for prisoners of conscience, the families of the disappeared and those on death row. It could have covered the NPOV reporting of repression and oppression, in other words, instead of being merely inspirational, it could have been relevant.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:34, 20 August 2014 (UTC).

I thought it did mention some of those things - maybe I ought to watch it again. And, it associated AI with WP just as much as vice versa; it was WP recruiting spiel just as much as Amnesty recruiting spiel, actually rather more so. Remember a great many people in the audience were not Wikipedians.

Aside from which, exactly how non-political should we censor a keynote speaker to be? If Stephen Fry had been the keynote speaker - it was lamented in the write-up that he was not - then he has plenty of political views too. So does Jimbo, in fact, about things relevant to Wikipedia. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:49, 20 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well indeed, but Jimbo would never use his keynote to push, for example, his views on the "right to be forgotten", would he? Oh wait....

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:19, 21 August 2014 (UTC).

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